SLOP1241: The Last Mile
Every project you've ever finished had a moment where it was 90% done and somehow still cost half its budget to close out. SLOP1241 is built on a single argument: finishing is a different skill from building, and almost everyone is worse at it. Across twelve weeks we chase that argument through eleven unrelated domains, why a rural broadband connection's last customer costs as much as all the others combined, why a peer-reviewed defect-cost multiplier gets misattributed to a study that never existed, why 98% of a building is legally a different object to 100% of one, and we end up with something more useful than a slogan: a working theory of where your own last mile is hiding, and why you keep underestimating it.
What you will do
You'll spend most weeks doing the same three things in a new domain: read a real case where finishing turned out to be the hard part, manipulate a small interactive model of that domain's specific cost curve, and argue, in writing, why that domain's version of the problem is or isn't like the others we've already covered. Two weeks break the pattern on purpose, one where the thesis stops applying and you have to say why, and a synthesis week where you stop collecting cases and start building your own framework. You walk out with a "last-mile audit", a real, unfinished thing you know personally, analysed using the framework the course built with you.
Who it is for
This is for anyone who has ever shipped something they were secretly embarrassed to call finished, and wants a better vocabulary for why. No prerequisites in any specific domain, weeks cover software, law, aerospace, and hospitality with equal seriousness, but you do need to be comfortable reading a real case study and arguing with it in writing, not just summarising it. If you want a course that stays comfortably in one field, this isn't it, if you want one argument tested against eleven different kinds of evidence, it is.